Another holiday massacre

At least 11 people were killed by gunmen who targeted a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday, in what the authorities called a terrorist attack. One of the shooters was also killed, the police said.

Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon of the New South Wales Police Force said on Sunday evening that officers had found what they believed to be several improvised explosive devices in a nearby vehicle linked to the suspect who was killed. Bomb disposal units were at the scene, he said.

“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”

The mass shooting came at a time when Australia’s Jewish community was already on edge, after enduring a series of alarming antisemitic attacks.

Some Jewish organizations say the episodes intensified after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, which have also spurred Islamophobic episodes in Australia.

“Our figures for antisemitic incidents are off the scale — of a level that we’ve never seen in the more than 30 years that we’ve been monitoring and collecting data,” Daniel Aghion, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told Sky News on Sunday, noting the recent spate of arson attacks.

“The last two years have been horrific for us,” he added, noting the rising instances of antisemitism around the world.

Australia is home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. Late last year, the Australian police formed a federal task force to investigate antisemitic violence and threats.

In August, Australia accused Iran of directing arson attacks against a Jewish business and a synagogue. It severed diplomatic ties with Iran and expelled Iranian diplomats from Australian soil.

And in the past 12 months, synagogues in Sydney and Melbourne have been targeted with attempted arson and graffiti. Other Jewish institutions, including a day care center and an Israeli restaurant, have also been attacked.

“How many times did we warn the Government?” the Australian Jewish Association said on Sunday in a post on Facebook. “We never felt once that they listened.”

Video of bystander disarming shooter. The bystander has since been identified by relatives as 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed.

The reflexive right wing idiot reaction to this sort of incident is that strict gun laws “don’t work,” but America’s homicide rate is 570% higher than Australia’s (.85 per 100K v. 5.7 per 100K), because 99.5% of gun homicides in the US are not public terror mass shootings like that at Brown University yesterday, but rather much more prosaic murders that get zero national media attention because they’re just part of the fabric of everyday life. Or as Charlie Kirk once put it, they’re just the price “we” pay for Freedom ™.

We’re supposed to go to a Hanukkah dinner at the house of Jewish friends of ours tonight, and the Australian prime minister’s well-meaning statement that an attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian doesn’t really capture the reality of this sort of thing. These people died because and only because they were Jewish, or at least at a Jewish celebration. “Globalize the intifada” means, practically speaking, murder innocent people if you think it will get you good results. Unless of course you believe in collective moral responsibility, which turns out to be completely indistinguishable from thinking like a Nazi.